Sex, Race and Holy War

excerpted from the book

American Holocaust

by David Stannard

Oxford University Press, 1992

p150

... the Jewish Holocaust-the inhuman destruction
of 6,000,000 people-was not an abominably unique event.(It was.)
So, too, for reasons of its own, was the mass murder of about
1,000,000 Armenians in Turkey a few decades prior to the Holocaust.
So, too, was the deliberately caused "terror-famine"
in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s, which killed more than
14,000,000 people. So, too, have been each of the genocidal slaughters
of many millions more, decades after the Holocaust, in Burundi,
Bangladesh, Kampuchea, East Timor, the Brazilian Amazon, and elsewhere.
Additionally, within the framework of the Holocaust itself, there
were aspects that were unique in the campaign of genocide conducted
by the Nazis against Europe's Romani (Gypsy) people, which resulted
in the mass murder of perhaps 1,500,000 men, women, and children.
Of course, there also were the unique horrors of the African slave
trade, during the course of which at least 30,000,000-and possibly
as many as 40,000,000 to 60,000,000-Africans were killed, most
of them in the prime of their lives, before they even had a chance
to begin working as human chattel on plantations in the Indies
and the Americas. And finally, there is the unique subject of
this book, the total extermination of many American Indian peoples
and the near-extermination of others, in numbers that eventually
totaled close to 100,000,000.

Each of these genocides was distinct and
unique, for one reason or another (as were (and are) others that
go unmentioned here. In one case the sheer numbers of people killed
may make it unique. In another case, the percentage of people
killed may make it unique. In still a different case, the greatly
compressed time period in which the genocide took place may make
it unique. In a further case, the greatly extended time period
in which the genocide took place may make it unique. No doubt
the targeting of a specific group or groups for extermination
by a particular nation's official policy may mark a given genocide
as unique. So too might another group's being unofficially (but
unmistakably) targeted for elimination by the actions of a multinational
phalanx bent on total extirpation. Certainly the chilling utilization
of technological instruments of destruction, such as gas chambers,
and its assembly-line, bureaucratic, systematic methods of destruction
makes the Holocaust unique. On the other hand, the savage employment
of non-technological instruments of destruction, such as the unleashing
of trained and hungry dogs to devour infants, and the burning
and crude hacking to death of the inhabitants of entire cities,
also makes the Spanish anti-Indian genocide unique.

A list of distinctions marking the uniqueness
of one or another group that has suffered from genocidal mass
destruction or near (or total) extermination could go on at length.
Additional problems emerge because of a looseness in the terminology
commonly used to describe categories and communities of genocidal
victims. A traditional Eurocentric bias that lumps undifferentiated
masses of "Africans" into one single category and undifferentiated
masses of "Indians" into another, while making fine
distinctions among the different populations of Europe, permits
the ignoring of cases in which genocide against Africans and American
Indians has resulted in the total extermination-purposefully carried
out-of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups.

A secondary tragedy of all these genocides,
moreover, is that partisan representatives among the survivors
of particular afflicted groups not uncommonly hold up their peoples'
experience as so fundamentally different from the others that
not only is scholarly comparison rejected out of hand, but mere
cross-referencing or discussion of other genocidal events within
the context of their own flatly is prohibited. It is almost as
though the preemptive conclusion that one's own group has suffered
more than others is something of a horrible award of distinction
that will be diminished if the true extent of another group's
suffering is acknowledged.

... despite an often expressed contempt
for Christianity, in Mein Kampf Hitler had written that his plan
for a triumphant Nazism was modeled on the Catholic Church's traditional
"tenacious adherence to dogma" and its "fanatical
intolerance," particularly in the Church's past when, as
Arno J. Mayer has noted, Hitler observed approvingly that in "building
'its own altar,' Christianity had not hesitated to 'destroy the
altars of the heathen.' ', 15 Had Hitler required supporting evidence
for this contention he would have needed to look no further than
the Puritans' godly justifications for exterminating New England's
Indians in the seventeenth century or, before that, the sanctimonious
Spanish legitimation of genocide, as ordained by Christian Truth,
in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Meso- and South America. (It
is worth noting also that the Fuhrer from time to time expressed
admiration for the "efficiency" of the American genocide
campaign against the Indians, viewing it as a forerunner for his
own plans and programs.) But the roots of the tradition run far
deeper than that-back to the high Middle Ages and before-when
at least part of the Christians' willingness to destroy the infidels
who lived in what was considered to be a spiritual wilderness
was rooted in a rabid need to kill the sinful wilderness that
lived within themselves. To understand the horrors that were inflicted
by Europeans and white Americans on the Indians of the Americas
it is necessary to begin with a look at the core of European thought
and culture-Christianity-and in particular its ideas on sex and
race and violence.

***

p185

From the moment of its birth Christianity
had envisioned the end of the world. Saints and theologians differed
on many details about the end, but few disagreements were as intense
as those concerned with the nature and timing of the events involved.
There were those who believed that as the end drew near conditions
on earth would grow progressively dire, evil would increase, love
would diminish, the final tribulations would be unleashed-and
then suddenly the Son of Man would appear: he would overcome Satan,
judge mankind, and bring an end to history. Others had what is
generally thought to be a more optimistic view: before reaching
the final grand conclusion, they claimed, there would be a long
reign of peace, justice, abundance, and bliss; the Jews would
be converted, while the heathens would be either converted or
annihilated; and, in certain versions of the prophecy, this Messianic
Age of Gold would be ushered in by a Last World Emperor-a human
saviour-who would prepare the way for the final cataclysmic but
glorious struggle between Good and Evil, whereupon history would
end with the triumphant Second Coming.

Among the innumerable forecasters of the
end of time who adopted a variation that combined elements of
both versions of the prophecy was the twelfth-century Calabrian
abbot Joachim of Fiore. Joachim's ideas became much more influential
than most, however, largely because they were adopted and transmitted
by the Spiritual branch of the Church's Franciscan Order during
the thirteenth through the fifteenth century. He and his followers
made calculations from evidence contained in Scriptural texts,
calculations purporting to show that the sequence of events leading
to the end of time would soon be-or perhaps already was-appearing.
As word of these predictions spread, the most fundamental affairs
of both Church and state were affected. And there had been no
previous time in human history when ideas were able to circulate
further or more rapidly, for it was in the late 1430s that Johann
Gutenberg developed the technique of printing with movable type
cast in molds. It has been estimated that as many as 20 million
books-and an incalculable number of pamphlets and tracts-were
produced and distributed in Europe between just 1450 and 1500."

The fifteenth century in Italy was especially
marked by presentiments that the end was near, as Marjorie Reeves
has shown in exhaustive detail, with "general anxiety . .
. building up to a peak in the 1480s and 1490s." Since at
least the middle of the century, the streets of Florence, Rome,
Milan, Siena, and other Italian cities-including Genoa, where
Columbus was born and spent his youth-had been filled with wandering
prophets, while popular tracts were being published and distributed
by the tens of thousands, and "astrological prognostications
were sweeping" the country. "The significant point to
grasp," Reeves demonstrates, "is that we are not dealing
here with two opposed viewpoints or groups-optimistic humanists
hailing the Age of Gold on the one hand, and medieval-style prophets
and astrologers proclaiming 'Woe!' on the other." Rather,
"foreboding and great hope lived side by side in the same
people.... Thus the Joachimist marriage of woe and exaltation
exactly fitted the mood of late fifteenth-century Italy, where
the concept of a humanist Age of Gold had to be brought into relation
with the ingrained expectation of Antichrist."

The political implications of this escalating
fever of both disquietude and anticipation grew out of the fact
that Joachim and those who were popularizing his ideas placed
the final struggle between ultimate good and ultimate evil after
the blissful Golden Age. Thus, "Joachim's central message
remained his affirmation of a real-though incomplete-achievement
of peace and beatitude within history," a belief that, in
the minds of many, "was quickly vulgarized into dreams of
world-wide empire." Different European nations and their
leaders, naturally, tried to claim this mantle- and with it the
title of Messiah-Emperor-as their own. But a prominent follower
of Joachim in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, Arnold
of Villanova, had prophesied that the man who would lead humanity
to its glorious new day would come from Spain. As we shall see,
Columbus knew of this prophecy (though he misidentified it with
Joachim himself) and spoke and wrote of it, but he was not alone;
for, in the words of Leonard I. Sweet, as the fifteenth century
was drawing to a close the Joachimite scheme regarding the end
of time "burst the bounds of Franciscan piety to submerge
Spanish society in a messianic milieu."

To a stranger visiting Europe during these
years, optimism would seem the most improbable of attitudes. For
quite some time the war with the infidel had been going rather
badly; indeed, as one historian has remarked: "as late as
1490 it would have seemed that in the eight-centuries-old struggle
between the Cross and the Crescent, the latter was on its way
to final triumph. The future seemed to lie not with Christ but
with the Prophet.'' At the end of the thirteenth century Jaffa
and Antioch and Tripoli and Acre, the last of the Christian strongholds
in the Holy Land, had fallen to the Muslims, and in 1453 Constantinople
had been taken by Sultan Muhammed II. Despite all the rivers of
blood that had been shed since the days of the first Crusade,
the influence of Christianity at this moment in time was confined
once again to the restricted boundaries of Europe. And within
those boundaries things were not going well, either.

Since the late fourteenth century, when
John Wyclif and his followers in England had publicly attacked
the Church's doctrine of transubstantiation and claimed that all
godly authority resided in the Scriptures and not to any degree
in the good offices of the Church, the rumblings of reformation
had been evident. In the fifteenth century the criticism continued,
from a variety of directions and on a variety of matters. On one
side, for instance, there was John Huss, an advocate of some of
Wyclif's views and a critic of papal infallibility and the practice
of granting indulgences. For his troubles, in 1415 Huss was burned
at the stake-after the Inquisitors first stripped him of his vestments,
cut the shape of a cross in his hair, and placed on his head a
conical paper hat painted with pictures of devils- following which
war broke out between Hussites and Catholics, war in which politics
and religion were inextricably intertwined, and war that continued
throughout most of the fifteenth century...

The papacy itself, meanwhile, recently
had suffered through forty years of the so-called Great Schism,
during which time there were two and even three rival claimants
as Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. After the schism was ended
at the Council of Constance in 1418, for the rest of the century
the papacy's behavior and enduring legacy continued to be one
of enormous extravagance and moral corruption. As many of the
late Middle Ages' "most pious minds" long had feared,
observes the great historian of the Inquisition, Henry Charles
Lea, "Christianity was practically a failure . . . The Church,
instead of elevating man, had been dragged down to his level."
This, of course, only further fanned the hot embers of reformation
which would burst into flame during the first decades of the century
to follow.

On the level of everyday life, we saw
in an earlier chapter the atrocious conditions under which most
of the peoples of Europe were forced to live as the late Middle
Ages crept forward. It was only a hundred years before Columbus's
mid-fifteenth-century birth that the Black Death had shattered
European society along with enormous masses of its population.
Within short order millions had died-about one out of every three
people across the entirety of Europe was killed by the pandemic-and
recovery was achieved only with excruciating slowness. "Those
few discreet folk who remained alive," recalled the Florentine
historian Matteo Villani, "expected many things":

They believed that those whom God's grace
had saved from death, having beheld the destruction of their neighbours
. . . would become better conditioned, humble, virtuous and Catholic;
that they would guard themselves from iniquity and sin and would
be full of love and charity towards one another. But no sooner
had the plague ceased than we saw the contrary . . . [People]
gave themselves up to a more shameful and disordered life than
they had led before.... Men thought that, by reason of the fewness
of mankind, there should be abundance of all produce of the land;
yet, on the contrary, by reason of men's ingratitude, everything
came to unwonted scarcity and remained long thus; nay, in certain
countries . . . there were grievous and unwonted famines. Again,
men dreamed of wealth and abundance ~n garments . . . yet, in
fact, things turned out widely different, for most commodities
were more costly, by twice or more, than before the plague And
the price of labour and the work of all trades and crafts, rose
in disorderly fashion beyond the double. Lawsuits and disputes
and quarrels and riots rose elsewhere among citizens in every
land.

Modern historical analysis has, in general
terms, confirmed Villani's description, with one important difference:
it was far too sanguine. For example, although wages did increase
in the century immediately following the explosion of the plague
in the middle of the fourteenth century, after that time they
spiraled drastically downward. The real wages of a typical English
carpenter serve as a vivid point of illustration: between 13S0
and 1450 his pay increased by about 64 percent; then his wages
started falling precipitously throughout the entirety of the next
two centuries, at last bottoming out at approximately half of
what they had been at the outbreak of the plague in 1348, fully
three centuries earlier. Meanwhile, during this same period, prices
of foodstuffs and other commodities were soaring upward at an
equivalent rate and more, ultimately achieving a 500 percent overall
increase during the sixteenth century.

The combination of simultaneously collapsing
wages and escalating prices in an already devastated social environment
was bad enough for an English carpenter, but English carpenters
were by no means poorly off compared with other laborers in Europe-and
other laborers were positively well off compared with the starving
multitudes who had no work at all. At the same time that the Black
Death was wiping out a third of Europe's population, and bouts
of famine were destroying many thousands more with each incident,
the Hundred Years War was raging; it began in 1337 and did not
end until 1453. And while the war was on, marauding bands of discharged
soldiers turned brigands and highwaymen-aptly named ecorcheurs
or "flayers"-were raping and pillaging the countryside.
Finally, the requirements of a war economy forced governments
to increase taxes. Immanuel Wallerstein explains how it all added
up:

The taxes, coming on top of already heavy
feudal dues, were too much for the producers, creating a liquidity
crisis which in turn led to a return to indirect taxes and taxes
in kind. Thus started a downward cycle: The fiscal burden led
to a reduction in consumption which led to a reduction in production
and money circulation which increased further the liquidity difficulties
which led to royal borrowing and eventually the insolvency of
the limited royal treasuries, which in turn created a credit crisis,
leading to hoarding of bullion, which in turn upset the pattern
of international trade. A rapid rise in prices occurred, further
reducing the margin of subsistence, and this began to take its
toll in population.

In sum, all the while that the popes and
other elites were indulging themselves in profligacy and decadence,
the basic political and economic frameworks of Europe-to say nothing
of the entire social order-were in a state of near collapse. Certain
states, of course, were worse off than others, and there are various
ways in which such comparative misery can be assayed. One measure
that we shall soon see has particular relevance for what happened
in the aftermath of Columbus's voyages to the New World ~s the
balance and nature of intra-European trade. In England and northwestern
Europe generally legislative and other efforts during this time

Discouraged the export of raw materials
such as wool in the case of England and encouraged the export
of manufactured goods. Thus, by the close of the fifteenth century
Britain was exporting 50,000 bolts of cloth annually rising to
more than two and a half times that figure within the next five
decades. Spain and Portugal at the same time remained exporters
of raw materials (wool, iron ore, salt oil and other items) and
importers of textiles hardwares and other manufactured products.
The Iberian nations with their backward and inflexible economic
systems were rapidly becoming economic dependencies of the expanding-if
themselves still impoverished-early capitalist states of northwest
Europe.

This then was the Old World on the eve
of Columbus's departure in 1492. For almost half a millennium
Christians had been launching hideously destructive holy wars
and massive enslavement campaigns against external enemies they
viewed as carnal demons and described as infidels- all m an effort
to recapture the Holy Land and all of which, it now seemed to
many effectively had come to naught. During those same long centuries
they had further expressed their ruthless intolerance of all persons
and thugs that were non-Christian by conducting pogroms against
the Jews who lived among them and whom they regarded as the embodiment
of
the Antichrist imposing torture exile and mass destruction on
those who refused to succumb to evangelical persuasion. These
great efforts too, appeared to have largely failed. Hundreds of
thousands of openly practicing Jews remained in the Europeans'
midst, and even those who had converted were suspected of being
the Devil's agents and spies treacherously boring from within
them.

Dominated by a theocratic culture and
world view that for a thousand years and more had been obsessed
with things sensual and sexual, and had demonstrated its obsession
in the only way its priesthood permitted-by intense and violent
sensual and sexual repression and "purification"-the
religious mood of Christendom's people at this moment was near
the boiling point. At its head the Church was mired in corruption,
while the ranks below were disappointed and increasingly disillusioned.
These are the sorts of conditions that, given the proper spark
lend themselves to what anthropologists and historians describe
as "millenarian" rebellion and upheaval or revitalization
movements." In point of fact this historical moment seen
m retrospect, was the inception of the Reformation which means
that it truly was nothing less than the eve of a massive revolution.
And when finally that revolution did explode, Catholic would kill
Protestant and Protestant would kill Catholic with the same zeal
and ferocity that their common Christian ancestors had reserved
for Muslims and Jews.

Don t let them live any longer the evil-doers
who turn us away from God " the Protestant radical Thomas
Muntzer soon would be crying to his followers. "For a godless
man"-he was referring to Catholics-has no right to live if
he hinders the godly.... The sword is necessary to exterminate
them.... If they resist, let them be slaughtered without mercy.

And, again and again, that is precisely
what happened: Catholics were indeed slaughtered without mercy.
The Church, of course, was more than eager to return such compliments
in deed as well as in word. Thus, for instance, Catholic vengeance
against Calvinists in sixteenth-century France resulted in the
killing of thousands. Infants were stabbed to death, women had
their hands cut off to remove gold bracelets, publishers of heretical
works were burned to death atop bonfires made from their books.
The treatment of Gaspard de Coligny, a Protestant leader was not
atypical after murdering him the Catholic mob mutilated his body,
cutting off his head, his hands, and his genitals-and then dragged
it through the streets, set fire to it and dumped it in the river....
[B]ut then deciding that it was not worthy of being food for the
fish, they hauled it out again ... [and] dragged what was left
of the body to the gallows of Montfaucon, 'to be meat and carrion
for maggots and crows.' Such furious rage continued well into
the seventeenth century, as, for example, m the Catholic sacking
of the Protestant city of Magdeburg, when at least 30 000 Protestants
were slain: "In a single church fifty-three women were found
beheaded," reported Friedrich Schiller while elsewhere babies
were stabbed and thrown into fires. "Horrible and revolting
to humanity was the scene that presented itself," Schiller
wrote, "the living crawling from under the dead, children
wandering about with heart-rending cries, calling for their parents;
and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers.

And this was Christian against Christian.
European against European. "Civilized" against "civilized."
There were all Europeans knew "wild" races, carnal and
un-Christian and uncivilized who lived m as-yet unexplored lands
on the far distant margins of the earth. Some of them were beasts,
some of them were human, and some of them hovered in the darkness
in between. One day-perhaps one day soon-they would be encountered
and important decisions would then have to be made. If they possessed
souls, if they were capable of understanding and embracing the
holy faith, every effort would be made to convert them-just as
every effort had always been made to convert Muslims and Jews.
If they proved incapable of conversion, if they had no souls-if
they were, that as children of the Devil-they would be slain.
God demanded as much.

For this era in the history of Christian
Europe appeared to many to be the threshold of the end of time.
Three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse clearly were loose
in the land: the rider on the red horse who is war, the rider
on the black horse who is famine; and the rider on the pale horse,
who is death. Only the rider on the white horse-who in most interpretations
of the biblical allegory is Christ-had not yet made his presence
known. And, although the signs were everywhere that the time of
his return was not far off, it remained his godly children's responsibility
to prepare the way for him.

Before Christ would return, all Christians
knew, the gospel had to be spread throughout the entire world,
and the entire world was not yet known. Spreading the gospel throughout
the world meant acceptance of its message by all the world's people,
once they had been located-and that in turn meant the total conversion
or extermination of all non-Christians. It also meant the liberation
of Zion, symbol of the Holy Land, and it likely meant the discovery
of the earthly paradise as well.

Christopher Columbus knew all these things.
Indeed, as we soon shall see, he was obsessed by them. In her
own way, Isabella, the queen of Spain, shared his grandiose vision
and his obsession. Still, in his first approach to the Spanish
court in 1486, seeking support for his planned venture, he had
been rebuffed. It was, in retrospect, understandable. Spain was
at that moment engaged intensely in its war with the Moors in
Granada. The Crown was impoverished. And Columbus offered a far
from secure investment. Five years later, however, the king and
queen relented. The reason for their change of heart in 1491 has
never been made entirely clear, but Isabella's unquenchable thirst
for victory over Islam almost certainly was part of the equation.
"A successful voyage would bring Spain into contact with
the nations of the East, whose help was needed in the struggle
with the Turk," writes J.H. Elliott. "It might also,
with luck, bring back Columbus by way of Jerusalem, opening up
a route for attacking the Ottoman Empire in the rear. Isabella
was naturally attracted, too, by the possibility of laying the
foundations of a great Christian mission in the East. In the climate
of intense religious excitement which characterized the last months
of the Grenada campaign even the wildest projects suddenly seemed
possible of accomplishment."

And then, on January 2, 1492, the Muslims
who controlled Granada surrendered. The first real victory of
Christian over infidel in a very long time, dearly it was a sign
that God looked favorably upon the decision to fund the enterprise
of the man whose given name meant "Christ-bearer." On
March 30th of that year the Jews of Spain were allowed four months
to convert to Catholicism or suffer expulsion-an ultimatum the
Moors also would be presented with before the following decade
had ended. And on April 30th, one month later, a royal decree
was issued suspending all Judicial proceedings against any criminals
who would agree to ship out with Columbus, because, the document
stated, "it is said that it is necessary to grant safe-conduct
to the persons who might join him, since under no other conditions
would they be willing to sail with him on the said voyage."
With the exception of four men wanted for murder, no known felons
accepted the offer. From what historians have been able to tell,
the great majority of the crews of the Nina, the Pinta, and the
Santa Maria-together probably numbering a good deal fewer than
a hundred-were not at that moment being pursued by the law, although,
no doubt, they were a far from genteel lot.

The three small ships left the harbor
at Palos ... The world would never again be the same: before long,
the bloodbath would begin.

***

p216

... during most of the sixteenth century
the Old World was awash in what military historian Robert L. O'Connell
calls a "harvest of blood," as European killed European
with an extraordinary unleashing of passion. And, of course, Spain
was in the thick of it.

In 1568, to cite but one example among
many, Philip ordered the duke of Alva-"probably the finest
soldier of his day," says O'Connell, "and certainly
the cruelest"-to the Netherlands, where Philip was using
the Inquisition to root out and persecute Protestants. The duke
promptly passed a death sentence upon the entire population of
the Netherlands: "he would have utter submission or genocide,"
O'Connell writes, "and the veterans of Spain stood ready
to enforce his will." Massacre followed upon massacre, on
one occasion leading to the mass drowning of 6000 to 7000 Netherlanders,
"a disaster which the burghers of Emden first realized when
several thousand broad-brimmed Dutch hats floated by."

As with most of his other debts, Philip
did not pay his soldiers on time, if at all, which created ruptures
in discipline and converted the Spanish troops into angry marauders
who compensated themselves with whatever they could take. As O'Connell
notes:

Gradually, it came to be understood that
should the Spanish succeed in taking a town, the population and
its possessions would constitute, in essence, the rewards. So
it was that, as the [Netherlands] revolt dragged on, predatory
behavior reinforced by economic self-interest came to assume a
very pure form. Thus, in addition to plunder, not only did the
slaughter of adult males and ritual rape of females increasingly
become routine, but other more esoteric acts began to crop up.
Repeatedly, according to John Motley, Spanish troops took to drinking
the blood of their victims ....

If this was the sort of thing that became
routine within Europe-as a consequence of "predatory behavior
reinforced by economic self-interest" on the part of the
Spanish troops-little other than unremitting genocide could be
expected from those very same troops when they were loosed upon
native peoples in the Caribbean and Meso- and South America- peoples
considered by the soldiers, as by most of their priestly and secular
betters, to be racially inferior, un-Christian, carnal beasts,
or, at best, in Bernardino de Minaya's words quoted earlier, "a
third species of animal between man and monkey" that was
created by God specifically to provide slave labor for Christian
caballeros and their designated representatives. Indeed, ferocious
and savage though Spanish violence in Europe was during the sixteenth
century, European contemporaries of the conquistadors well recognized
that by "serving as an outlet for the energies of the unruly,"
in J.H. Elliott's words, the New World saved Europe, and Spain
itself, from even worse carnage. "It is an established fact,"
the sixteenth century Frenchman Henri de la Popeliniere wrote
with dry understatement, "that if the Spaniard had not sent
to the Indies discovered by Columbus all the rogues in his realm,
and especially those who refused to return to their ordinary employment
after the wars of Granada against the Moors, these would have
stirred up the country or given rise to certain novelties in Spain."

To the front-line Spanish troops, then,
once they had conquered and stolen from the Indians all the treasure
the natives had accumulated for themselves, the remaining indigenous
population represented only an immense and bestial labor force
to be used by the Christians to pry gold and silver from the earth.
Moreover, so enormous was the native population- at least during
the early years of each successive stage in the overall conquest-that
the terrorism of torture, mutilation, and mass murder was the
simplest means for motivating the Indians to work; and for the
same reason-the seemingly endless supply of otherwise superfluous
population- the cheapest way of maximizing their profits was for
the conquistadors to work their Indian slaves until they dropped.
Replacing the dead with new captives, who themselves could be
worked to death, was far cheaper than feeding and caring for a
long-term resident slave population.

***

p220

Just as social thought does not bloom
in a political vacuum ... neither do institutions come into being
and sustain themselves without the inspiration of economic or
political necessity. In sixteenth-century Spain, as we have seen
that necessity was created by an impoverished and financially
dependent small nation that made itself into an empire, an empire
that engaged in ambitious wars of expansion (and vicious Inquisitorial
repression of suspected non-believers within), but an empire with
a huge and gaping hole in its treasury: no sooner were gold or
silver deposited than they drained away to creditors. The only
remedy for this, since control of expenditures did not fit with
imperial visions, was to accelerate the appropriation of wealth.
And this demanded the theft and mining of more and more New World
gold and silver.

... As with Hispaniola, Tenochtitlan,
Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards' mammoth destruction of whole
societies generally was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement,
a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself. And
therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed
by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America
extermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because
it made economic sense.

... By the close of the sixteenth century
bullion, primarily silver, made up more than 95 percent of all
exports leaving Spanish America for Europe. Nearly that same percentage
of the indigenous population had been destroyed in the process
of seizing those riches. In its insatiable hunger, Spain
was devouring all that was of most value in its conquered New
World ~J territories-the fabulous wealth in people, culture, and
precious metals that \ had so excited the European imagination
in the heady era that immediately followed Columbus's return from
his first voyage. The number of indigenous people in the Caribbean
and Meso- and South America in 1492 probably had been at least
equal to that of all Europe, including Russia, at the time. Not
much more than a century later it was barely equal to that of
England. Entire rich and elaborate and ancient cultures had been
erased from the face of the earth.

***
p222

The story of British conquest and colonization
in North America is, in economic terms, almost precisely the opposite
of Spain's experience to the south. In the north, without a cornucopia
of treasure to devour and people to exploit, the English were
forced to engage in endeavors that led to long-term development
rather than short-term growth, particularly in New England. Far
fewer native people greeted the British explorers and colonists
than had welcomed the Spanish, in part because the population
of the continent north of Mexico had always been smaller and less
densely settled, and in part because by the time British colonists
arrived European diseases had had more time to spread and destroy
large numbers of Indians in Virginia, New England, and beyond.
These regions also contained nothing even remotely comparable
to the exportable mineral wealth the Spanish had found in the
areas they invaded. The most the northern climes had to offer
in this regard was fish. To be sure, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the English imported huge amounts of cod from America's
North Atlantic waters, and later tobacco and furs were brought
in. But fish, tobacco, and furs were not the same as gold or silver.

Nevertheless, despite the very dissimilar
economic and native demographic situations they found, the British
wasted little time in exterminating the indigenous people. The
English and later the Americans, in fact, destroyed at least as
high a percentage of the Indians they encountered as earlier had
the Spanish, probably higher; it was only their means and motivation
that contrasted with those of the conquistadors.

***
p229

In recent years some historians have begun
pointing out that the British colonists in Virginia and New England
greatly intensified their hostility toward and their barbarous
treatment of the Indians as time wore on. One of the principal
causes of this change in temperament, according to these scholars,
was the Europeans' realization that the native people were going
to persist in their reluctance to adopt English religious and
cultural habits, no matter how intense the British efforts to
convert them...

... the Europeans' predisposition to racist
enmity regarding the Indians had long been both deeply embedded
in Western thought and was intimately entwined with attitudes
toward nature, sensuality, and the body. That there were some
Europeans who appreciated and even idealized native cultural values-and
some settlers who ran off to live with the Indians because they
found their lifeways preferable to their own-is undeniable. But
these were rarities, and rarities with little influence, within
a steadily rising floodtide of racist opinion to the contrary.

What in fact was happening in those initial
years of contact between the British and America's native peoples
was a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy, though one with
genocidal consequences. Beginning with a false prejudgment of
the Indians as somehow other than conventionally human in European
terms (whether describing them as living "after the manner
of the Golden Age" or as "wild beasts and unreasonable
creatures"), everything the Indians did that marked them
as incorrigibly non-European and non-Christian-and therefore permanently
non-civilized n British eyes-enhanced their definitionally less
-than-human status. Treating them according to this false definition
naturally brought on a resentful response from the Indians-one
which only "proved" (albeit spuriously) that the definition
had been valid from the start. In his famous study of this phenomenon
Robert K. Merton-after quoting the sociological dictum that "if
men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences"-
pointed out that "the specious validity of the self-fulfilling
prophecy perpetuates a reign of error." In the early and
subsequent years of British-Indian contact, however, it produced
and perpetuated a reign of terror because it was bound up with
an English lust for power, land, and wealth, and because the specific
characteristics that the English found problematic in the Indians
were attributes that fit closely with ancient but persistently
held ideas about the anti-Christian hallmarks of infidels, witches,
and wild men.

It was only to be expected, therefore,
that when the witchcraft crisis at Salem broke out as the seventeenth
century was ending, it would be blamed by New England's foremost
clergyman on "the Indians, whose chief Sagamores are well
known unto some our Captives, to have been horrid Sorcerers, and
hellish Conjurers, and such as Conversed with Daemons." Indeed,
as Richard Slotkin has shown, the fusion of the satanic and the
native in the minds of the English settlers by this time had become
so self-evident as to require no argument. Thus, when a young
woman named Mercy Short became possessed by the Devil, she described
the beast who had visited her as "a wretch no taller than
an ordinary Walking-Staff; he was not of a Negro, but of a Tawney,
or an Indian colour; he wore a high-crowned Hat, with straight
Hair; and had one Cloven-foot." Observes Slotkin: "He
was, in fact, a figure out of the American Puritan nightmare .
. . Indian-colored, dressed in a Christian's hat, with a beast
s foot-a kind of Indian-Puritan, man-animal half-breed.

***
p231

... Probably never before in Christian
history had the idea that humankind was naturally corrupt and
debased reached and influenced the daily lives of a larger proportion
of the lay community than during New England's seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries.

***

... from the earliest days of settlement
the British colonists repeatedly expressed a haunting fear that
they would be "contaminated" by the presence of the
Indians, a contamination that must be avoided lest it become the
beginning of a terrifying downward slide toward their own bestial
degeneration. Thus, unlike the Spanish before them, British men
in the colonies from the Carolinas to New England rarely engaged
in sexual relations with the Indians, even during those times
when there were few if any English women available. Legislation
was passed that "banished forever" such mixed race couples,
referring to their offspring in animalistic terms as "abominable
mixture and spurious issue," though even without formal prohibitions
such intimate encounters were commonly "reckoned a horrid
crime with us," in the words of one colonial Pennsylvanian."
It is little wonder, then, that Mercy Short described the creature
that possessed her as both a demon and, in Slotkin's words, "a
kind of Indian-Puritan, man-animal half-breed," for this
was the ultimate and fated consequence of racial contamination.

Again, however, such theological, psychological,
and legislative preoccupations did not proceed to the rationalization
of genocide without a social foundation and impetus. And if possessive
and tightly constricted attitude toward sex, an abhorrence of
racial intermixture, and a belief in humankind's innate depravity
had for centuries been hallmarks of Christianity and therefore
of the West's definition of civilization, by the time the British
exploration and settlement of America had begun, the very essence
of humanity also was coming to be associated in European thought
with a similarly possessive, exclusive, and constricted attitude
toward property. For it is precisely of this time that R.H. Tawney
was writing when he observed the movement away from the earlier
medieval belief that "private property is a necessary institution,
at least in a fallen world . . . but it is to be tolerated as
a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself,"
to the notion that "the individual is absolute master of
his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit
it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained
by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being
of his neighbors, or to give account of his actions to a higher
authority."

The concept of private property as a positive
good and even an insignia of civilization took hold among both
Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century. Thus,
for example, in Spain, Juan Gines de Sepulveda argued that the
absence of private property was one of the characteristics of
people lacking "even vestiges of humanity," and in Germany
at the same time Martin Luther was contending "that the possession
of private property was an essential difference between men and
beasts." In England, meanwhile, Sir Thomas More was proclaiming
that land justifiably could be taken from "any people [who]
holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to no good or profitable
use," an idea that also was being independently advanced
in other countries by Calvin, Melanchthon, and others. Typically,
though, none was as churlish as Luther, who pointed out that the
Catholic St. Francis had urged his followers to get rid of their
property and give it to the poor: "I do not maintain that
St. Francis was simply wicked," wrote Luther, "but his
works show that he was a weak-minded and freakish man, or to say
the truth, a fool."

The idea that failure to put property
to "good or profitable use" was grounds for seizing
it became especially popular with Protestants, who thereby advocated
confiscating the lands owned by Catholic monks. As Richard Schlatter
explains:

The monks were condemned, not for owning
property, but because they did not use that property in an economically
productive fashion. At best they used it to produce prayers. Luther
and the other Reformation leaders insisted that it should be used,
not to relieve men from the necessity of working, but as a tool
for making more goods. The attitude of the Reformation was practically,
"not prayers, but production." And production, not for
consumption, but for more production.

The idea of production for the sake of
production, of course, was one of the central components of what
Max Weber was to call the Protestant Ethic.

***

p237

As early as the first explorations at
Roanoke, Thomas Hariot had observed that whenever the English
visited an Indian village, "within a few days after our departure
. . . the people began to die very fast, and many in a short space:
in some towns about twenty, in some forty, in some sixty, and
in one six score, which in truth was very many in respect of their
numbers." As usual, the British were unaffected by these
mysterious plagues. In initial explanation, Hariot could only
report that "some astrologers, knowing of the Eclipse of
the Sun, which we saw the same year before on our voyage thitherward,"
thought that might have some bearing on the matter. But such events
as solar eclipses and comets (which Hariot also mentions as possibly
having some relevance) were, like the epidemics themselves, the
work of God. No other interpretation was possible. And that was
why, before long, Hariot also was reporting that there seemed
to be a divinely drawn pattern to the diseases: miraculously,
he said, they affected only those Indian communities "where
we had any subtle device practiced against us." In other
words, the Lord was selectively punishing only those Indians who
plotted against the English.

Needless to say, the reverse of that logic
was equally satisfying-that is, that only those Indians who went
unpunished were not evil. And if virtually all were punished?
The answer was obvious. As William Bradford was to conclude some
years later when epidemics almost totally destroyed the Indian
population of Plymouth Colony, without affecting the English:
"It pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness
and such a mortality that of a thousand, above nine and a half
hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above the ground
for want of burial." All followers of the Lord could only
give thanks to "the marvelous goodness and providence of
God," Bradford concluded. It was a refrain that soon would
be heard throughout the land. After all, prior to the Europeans'
arrival, the New World had been but "a hideous and desolate
wilderness," Bradford said elsewhere, a land "full of
wild beasts and wild men." In killing the Indians in massive
numbers, then, the English were only doing their sacred duty,
working hand in hand with the God who was protecting them.

For nothing else, only divine intervention,
could account for the "prodigious Pestilence" that repeatedly
swept the land of nineteen out of every twenty Indian inhabitants,
wrote Cotton Mather, "so that the Woods were almost cleared
of these pernicious Creatures, to make room for a better Growth."
Often this teamwork of God and man seemed to be perfection itself,
as in King Philip's War. Mather recalled that in one battle of
that war the English attacked the native people with such ferocity
that "their city was laid in ashes. Above twenty of their
chief captains were killed; a proportionable desolation cut off
the interior salvages; mortal sickness, and horrid famine pursued
the remainders of 'em, so we can hardly tell where any of 'em
are left alive upon the face of the earth."

Thus the militant agencies of God and
his chosen people became as one. Mather believed, with many others,
that at some time in the distant past the "miserable salvages"
known as Indians had been "decoyed" by the Devil to
live in isolation in America "in hopes that the gospel of
the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb
his absolute empire over them."' But God had located the
evil brutes and sent his holiest Christian warriors over from
England where-with the help of some divinely sprinkled plagues
- they joyously had "Irradiated an Indian wilderness."
It truly was, as another New England saint entitled his own history
of the holy settlement, a "wonder-working providence."

***

Again and again the explanatory circle
closed upon itself. Although they carried with them the same thousand
years and more of repressed, intolerant, and violent history that
earlier had guided the conquistadors, in their explorations and
settlements the English both left behind and confronted before
them very different material worlds than had the Spanish. For
those who were their victims it didn't matter very much. In addition
to being un-Christian, the Indians were uncivilized and perhaps
not even fully human. The English had been told that by the Spanish,
but there were many other proofs of it; one was the simple fact
(untrue, but that was immaterial) that the natives "roamed"
the woods like wild beasts, with no understanding of private property
holdings or the need to make "improvements" on the land.
In their generosity the Christian English would bring to these
benighted creatures the word of Christ and guidance out of the
dark forest of their barbarism. For these great gifts the English
only demanded in return-it was, after all, their God-given right-whatever
land they felt they needed, to bound and fence at will, and quick
capitulation to their religious ways.

In fact, no serious effort ever was made
by the British colonists or their ministers to convert the Indians
to the Christian faith. Nor were the Indians especially receptive
to the token gestures that were proffered: they were quite content
with their peoples' ancient ways.' In addition, it was not long
before the English had outworn their welcome with demands for
more and more of the natives' ancestral lands. Failure of the
Indians to capitulate in either the sacred or the secular realms,
however, was to the English all the evidence they needed-indeed,
all that they were seeking- to prove that in their dangerous and
possibly contaminating bestiality the natives were an incorrigible
and inferior race. But God was making a place for his Christian
children in this wilderness by slaying the Indians with plagues
of such destructive power that only in the Bible could precedents
for them be found. His divine message was too plain for misinterpretation.
And the fact that it fit so closely with the settlers' material
desires only made it all the more compelling. There was little
hope for these devil's helpers of the forest. God's desire, proved
by his unleashing wave upon wave of horrendous pestilence-and
pestilence that killed selectively only Indians-was a command
to the saints to join his holy war.

***

p240

Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address
delivered less than two centuries since the founding of the first
permanent English colomes:

A rising nation, spread over a wide and
fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions
of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power
and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach
of the mortal eye-when I contemplate these transcendent objects,
and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved
country committed to the issue, and the auspices of this day,
I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the
magnitude of the undertaking.

It was in pursuit of these and other grand
visions that Jefferson later would write of the remaining Indians
in America that the government was obliged "now to pursue
them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach."
For the native peoples of Jefferson's "rising nation,"
of his "beloved country"-far from being Bolivar's "legitimate
owners"- were in truth, most Americans believed, little more
than dangerous wolves. Andrew Jackson said this plainly in urging
American troops to root out from their "dens" and kill
Indian women and their "whelps," adding in his second
annual message to Congress that while some people tended to grow
"melancholy" over the Indians' being driven by white
Americans to their "tomb," an understanding of "true
philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does
to the extinction of one generation to make room for another."

Before either Jefferson or Jackson, George
Washington, the father of the country, had said much the same
thing: the Indians were wolves and beasts who deserved nothing
from the whites but "total ruin." And Washington himself
was only repeating what by then was a very traditional observation.
Less than a decade after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony in 1630, for example, it was made illegal to "shoot
off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an
Indian or a wolf." As Barry Lopez has noted, this was far
from a single-incident comparison. So alike did Indians and wolves
appear to even the earliest land hungry New England colonist that
the colonist "fell to dealing with them in similar ways":

He set out poisoned meat for the wolf
and gave the Indian blankets infected with smallpox. He raided
the wolf's den to dig out and destroy the pups, and stole the
Indian's children .... When he was accused of butchery for killing
wolves and Indians, he spun tales of Mohawk cruelty and of wolves
who ate fawns while they were still alive.... Indians and wolves
who later came into areas where there were no more of either were
called renegades. Wolves that lay around among the buffalo herds
were called loafer wolves and Indians that hung around the forts
were called loafer Indians.

As is so often the case, it was New England's
religious elite who made the point more graphically than anyone.
Referring to some Indians who had given offense to the colonists,
the Reverend Cotton Mather wrote: "Once you have but got
the Track of those Ravenous howling Wolves, then pursue them vigourously;
Turn not back till they are consumed.... Beat them small as the
Dust before the Wind." Lest this be regarded as mere rhetoric,
empty of literal intent, consider that another of New England's
most esteemed religious leaders, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard,
as late as 1703 formally proposed to the Massachusetts Governor
that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal to purchase
and train large packs of dogs "to hunt Indians as they do
bears." There were relatively few Indians remaining alive
in New England by this time, but those few were too many for the
likes of Mather and Stoddard. "The dogs would be an extreme
terror to the Indians," Stoddard wrote, adding that such
"dogs would do a great deal of execution upon the enemy and
catch many an Indian that would be too light of foot for us."
Then, turning from his equating of native men and women and children
with bears deserving to be hunted down and destroyed, Stoddard
became more conventional in his imagery: "if the Indians
were as other people," he acknowledged, ". . . it might
be looked upon as inhumane to pursue them in such a manner";
but, in fact, the Indians were wolves, he said, "and are
to be dealt withal as wolves." For two hundred years to come
Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and other leaders, representing
the wishes of virtually the entire white nation, followed these
ministers' genocidal instructions with great care. It was their
Christian duty as well as their destiny.

***

p242

... when in 1492 the seal was broken on
the membrane that for tens of thousands of years had kept the
residents of North and South America isolated from the inhabitants
of the earth's other inhabited continents, the European adventurers
and colonists who rushed through the breach were representatives
of a religious culture that was as theologically arrogant and
violence-justifying as any the world had ever seen. Nourished
by a moral history that despised the self and that regarded the
body and things sensual as evil, repulsive, and bestial, it was
a culture whose holiest exemplars not only sought out pain and
degradation as the foundation of their faith, but who simultaneously
both feared and pursued what they regarded as the dark terrors
of the wilderness-the wilderness in the world outside as well
as the wilderness of the soul within. It was a faith that considered
all humanity in its natural state to be "sick, suffering,
and helpless" because its earliest mythical progenitors-who
for a time had been the unclothed inhabitants of an innocent Earthly
Paradise-had succumbed to a sensual temptation that was prohibited
by a jealous and angry god, thereby committing an "original
sin" that thenceforth polluted the very essence of every
infant who had the poor luck to be born. Ghastly and disgusting
as the things of this world-including their own persons-were to
these people, they were certain of at least one thing: that their
beliefs were absolute truth, and that those who persisted in believing
otherwise could not be tolerated. For to tolerate evil was to
encourage evil, and no sin was greater than that. Moreover, if
the flame of intolerance that these Christian saints lit to purge
humanity of those who persisted down a path of error became a
sacred conflagration in the form of a crusade or holy war-that
was only so much the better. Such holocausts themselves were part
of God's divine plan, after all, and perhaps even were harbingers
of his Son's imminent Second Coming.

It is impossible to know today how many
of the very worldly men who first crossed the Atlantic divide
were piously ardent advocates of this worldview, and how many
merely unthinkingly accepted it as the religious frame within
which they pursued their avaricious quests for land and wealth
and power. Some were seeking souls. Most were craving treasure,
or land on which to settle. But whatever their individual levels
of theological consciousness, they encountered in this New World
astonishing numbers of beings who at first seemed to be the guardians
of a latter-day Eden, but who soon became for them the very picture
of Satanic corruption.

And through it all, as with their treatment
of Europe's Jews for the preceding half-millennium-and as with
their response to wildness and wilderness since the earliest dawning
of their faith-the Christian Europeans continued to display a
seemingly antithetical set of tendencies: revulsion from the terror
of pagan or heretical pollution and, simultaneously, eagerness
to make all the world's repulsive heretics and pagans into followers
of Christ. In its most benign racial manifestation, this was the
same inner prompting that drove missionaries to the ends of the
earth to Christianize people of color, but to insist that their
new converts worship in segregated churches. Beginning in the
late eighteenth century in America, this conflict of racial abhorrence
and mission-and along with it a redefined concept of holy war-became
secularized in the form of an internally contradictory political
ideology. In the same way that the Protestant Ethic was transformed
into the Spirit of Capitalism, while the Christian right to private
property became justifiable in wholly secular terms, America as
Redeemer Nation became Imperial America, fulfilling its irresistible
and manifest destiny.

During the country's early national period
this took the form of declarations that America should withdraw
from world affairs into moral isolation (to preserve the chaste
new nation from the depravities of the Old World and the miserable
lands beyond) that was uttered in the same breath as the call
to export the "Rising Glory of America," to bring democracy
and American-style civilization to less fortunate corners of the
earth. Less than a century later, during the peak era of American
imperialism, the same contradictory mission presented itself again:
while those Americans who most opposed expansion into the Philippines
shared the imperialists' belief in the nation's predestined right
to rule the world, they resisted efforts to annex a nation of
"inferior" dark-skinned people largely because of fears
they had of racial contamination. Charles Francis Adams, Jr.,
said it most straightforwardly when he referred to America's virulent
treatment of the Indians as the lesson to recall in all such cases,
because, harsh though he admitted such treatment was, it had "saved
the Anglo-Saxon stock from being a nation of half-breeds."
In these few words were both a terrible echo of past warrants
for genocidal race war and a chilling anticipation of eugenic
justifications for genocide yet to come, for to this famous scion
of America's proudest family, the would-be extermination of an
entire race of people was preferable to the "pollution"
of racial intermixture.

It was long before this time, however,
that the notion of the deserved and fated extermination of America's
native peoples had become a commonplace and secularized ideology.
In 1784 a British visitor to America observed that "white
Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race
of Indians; nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating
them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children."
And this visitor was not speaking only of the opinion of those
whites who lived on the frontier. Wrote the distinguished early
nineteenth century scientist, Samuel G. Morton: "The benevolent
mind may regret the inaptitude of the Indian for civilization,"
but the fact of the matter was that the "structure of [the
Indian's] mind appears to be different from that of the white
man, nor can the two harmonize in the social relations except
on the most limited scale." "Thenceforth," added
Francis Parkman, the most honored American historian of his time,
the natives-whom he described as "man, wolf, and devil all
in one"-"were destined to melt and vanish before the
advancing waves of Anglo-American power, which now rolled westward
unchecked and unopposed." The Indian, he wrote, was in fact
responsible for his own destruction, for he "will not learn
the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together."

But by this time it was not just the native
peoples of America who were being identified as the inevitable
and proper victims of genocidal providence and progress. In Australia,
whose aboriginal population had been in steep decline (from mass
murder and disease) ever since the arrival of the white man, it
commonly was being said in scientific and scholarly publications,
that to the Aryan . . . apparently belong the destinies of the
future. The races whose institutions and inventions are despotism,
fetishism, and cannibalism-the races who rest content in . . .
placid sensuality and unprogressive decrepitude, can hardly hope
to contend permanently in the great struggle for existence with
the noblest division of the human species.... The survival of
the fittest means that might-wisely used-is right. And thus we
invoke and remorselessly fulfill the inexorable law of natural
selection when exterminating the inferior Australian.

Meanwhile, by the 1860s, with only a remnant
of America's indigenous people still alive, in Hawaii the Reverend
Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those
islands' native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined
to see it as a tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian
people was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent
to "the amputation of diseased members of the body."
Two decades later, in New Zealand, whose native Maori people also
had suffered a huge population collapse from introduced disease
and warfare with invading British armies, one A.K. Newman spoke
for many whites in that country when he observed that "taking
all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is
scarcely subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick,
easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race."

Returning to America, the famed Harvard
physician and social commentator Oliver Wendell Holmes observed
in 1855 that Indians were nothing more than a "half-filled
outline of humanity" whose "extermination" was
the necessary "solution of the problem of his relation to
the white race." Describing native peoples as "a sketch
in red crayons of a rudimental manhood," he added that it
was only natural for the white man to "hate" the Indian
and to "hunt him down like the wild beasts of the forest,
and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is
ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image."

Two decades later, on the occasion of
the nation's 1876 centennial celebration, the country's leading
literary intellectual took time out in an essay expressing his
"thrill of patriotic pride" flatly to advocate "the
extermination of the red savages of the plains." Wrote William
Dean Howells to the influential readers of the Atlantic Monthly:

The red man, as he appears in effigy and
in photograph in this collection [at the Philadelphia Centennial
Exposition], is a hideous demon, whose malign traits can hardly
inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence. In blaming our Indian
agents for malfeasance in office, perhaps we do not sufficiently
account for the demoralizing influence of merely beholding those
false and pitiless savage faces; moldy flour and corrupt beef
must seem altogether too good for them.

Not to be outdone by the most eminent
historians, scientists, and cultural critics of the previous generation,
several decades later still, America's leading psychologist and
educator, G. Stanley Hall, imperiously surveyed the human wreckage
that Western exploration and colonization had created across the
globe, and wrote:

Never, perhaps, were lower races being
extirpated as weeds in the human garden, both by conscious and
organic processes, so rapidly as to-day. In many minds this is
inevitable and not without justification. Pity and sympathy, says
Nietzsche, are now a disease, and we are summoned to rise above
morals and clear the world's stage for the survival of those who
are fittest because strongest.... The world will soon be overcrowded,
and we must begin to take selective agencies into our own hands.
Primitive races are either hopelessly decadent and moribund, or
at best have demonstrated their inability to domesticate or civilize
themselves.

And not to be outdone by the exalted likes
of Morton, Parkman, Holmes, Howells, Adams, or Hall, the man who
became America's first truly twentieth century President, Theodore
Roosevelt, added his opinion that the extermination of the American
Indians and the expropriation of their lands "was as ultimately
beneficial as it was inevitable. Such conquests," he continued,
"are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw
barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with the weaker and
wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp."
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this beloved American
hero and Nobel Peace Prize recipient (who once happily remarked
that "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians
are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't
like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth")
also believed that "degenerates" as well as "criminals
. . . and feeble-minded persons [should] be forbidden to leave
offspring behind them." The better classes of white Americans
were being overwhelmed, he feared, by "the unrestricted breeding"
of inferior racial stocks, the "utterly shiftless,"
and the "worthless."

These were sentiments, applied to others,
that the world would hear much of during the 1930s and 1940s.
(Indeed, one well-known scholar of the history of race and racism,
Pierre L. van den Berghe, places Roosevelt within an unholy triumvirate
of the modern world's leading racist statesmen; the other two,
according to van den Berghe, are Adolf Hitler and Hendrik Verwoerd,
South Africa's original architect of apartheid.)'47 For the "extirpation"
of the "lower races" that Hall and Roosevelt were celebrating
drew its justification from the same updated version of the Great
Chain of Being that eventually inspired Nazi pseudoscience. Nothing
could be more evident than the fundamental agreement of both these
men (and countless others who preceded them) with the central
moral principle underlying that pseudoscience, as expressed by
the man who has been called Germany's "major prophet of political
biology," Ernst Haeckel, when he wrote that the "lower
races"-Sepulveda's "homunculi" with few "vestiges
of humanity"; Mather's "ravenous howling wolves";
Holmes's "half-filled outline of humanity"; Howells's
"hideous demons"; Hall's "weeds in the human garden";
Roosevelt's "weaker and wholly alien races"-were so
fundamentally different from the "civilized Europeans [that]
we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their
lives." Nor could anything be clearer, as Robert Jay Lifton
has pointed out in his exhaustive study of the psychology of genocide,
than that such thinking was nothing less than the "harsh,
apocalyptic, deadly rationality" that drove forward the perverse
holy war of the Nazi extermination campaign.

The first Europeans to visit the continents
of North and South America and the islands of the Caribbean, like
the Nazis in Europe after them, produced many volumes of grandiloquently
racist apologia for the genocidal holocaust they carried out.
Not only were the "lower races" they encountered in
the New World dark and sinful, carnal and exotic, proud, inhuman,
un-Christian inhabitants of the nether territories of humanity-
contact with whom, by civilized people, threatened morally fatal
contamination-but God, as always, was on the Christians' side.
And God's desire, which became the Christians' marching orders,
was that such dangerous beasts and brutes must be annihilated.

Elie Wiesel is right: the road to Auschwitz
was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another
conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the
road's pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and
of North and South America.